Vapor recompression Process Flowsheets & Simulations
Explore 3 validated, solved Vapor recompression simulation flowsheets in MaximaLabs — real components: ethanol, water, propane, propylene. Open any one directly in your browser.
Solved via: NRTL, PENG-ROBINSON.
Superheated-steam drying loop with MVR heat recovery
A wet cake is dried in a superheated-steam dryer (steam as the drying medium instead of hot air), and the evaporated moisture — pure steam — is recovered by mechanical vapor recompression (MVR) plus a trim superheater into high-grade superheated steam that reheats the recirculating drying medium. Superheated-steam drying is the energy-efficient route for biofuel and food solids (distillers' grains, beet pulp, lignite): because the drying atmosphere is steam, the evaporated water leaves as more steam whose latent heat is recompressed and reused, instead of being lost in a humid exhaust.
9 unit ops • NRTL
224 0
View & openVapor re-compression propane/propylene splitter
Propylene/propane splitters have a notoriously low relative volatility (~1.1-1.15), so they run at high reflux and benefit from heat pumping: the overhead vapor is compressed and used to reboil the same column at a lower operating pressure (here 12 bar vs. a conventional ~20 bar), cutting the compressor shell cost (Christopher et al., Ind. Eng. Chem. Res. 56, 14557, 2017). The reboiler heat-integration loop itself is not modeled here (that would need a recycle-coupled duty match) — this shows the column plus the overhead compression/condensing train, a bounded simplification.
6 unit ops • PENG-ROBINSON
221 0
View & openBio-ethanol: energy-integrated distillation + MVR stillage concentration
A dilute beer (10% ethanol) is concentrated toward the azeotrope in a beer column, and the water-rich stillage bottoms are concentrated in an evaporator whose vapor is recompressed by a mechanical-vapor-recompression (MVR) compressor — recovering the stillage vapor's latent heat as high-grade heating duty instead of venting it, the energy-integration route that eliminates a separate thermal oxidizer.
9 unit ops • NRTL
224 0
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